We slip through branches spider webs fallen trees and stones pushing through the earth like bubbles, and I hear things. Twigs snapping in the distance. Something falling from above and swiping at leaves as it rushes toward the ground.

With heavy plodding feet my imagination steps heavily all around me, shuffling through undergrowth. It's near. Hershey runs up behind me and squeezes past me while Bandit's tail quivers and he digs. Lily reaches the hilltop first, pushes past the crooked tree that I use as a grip to yank my legs over the crest. She's gone -- a distant movement back and forth back and forth at the edge of a short blueberry field. I walk through a spider web.

With the other two I rush over rocks and climb an easy slope where I see the old stone foundation in a brief clearing.

Daydreaming, I remember friendships from years ago. Along with Erin, other people pressed gently into my soft, fluid tissue and left their impressions. Running my fingers across my memories now I find spots in mind where Tim walked through.

Weird how these tenuous little threads to the past suddenly snap tight. I think an old woman's spirit is in charge of everything. She sits, watchful, and knits. She is forever tying together or untangling people's lives with just the right length of thread. With some friendships, like Erin's, she puts down the skein and drifts off, but we're forever connected.

I also spoke to Tim recently and I remember things about school and myself that I had accidentally dropped in the sand and kept walking. Little details come back and I sit here again looking at a past that i can't reach anymore.

For days I have also seen flashes of a favorite image I keep.

I see something more recent. I was bartending one day a few years ago when Jerry walked in with this beautiful kid wedged on his hip like a doll. He walked in all dirty from work with tool belts and grime everywhere, and had this amazing blond wispy-haired child. It's juts an image stuck in my head...I think he dropped off something for the beer coolers and walked back out.

Tonight I ask Jerry, do you remember a day when I was bartending at Cafe 127 and you walked in carrying Erica? It was before we started dating…

No, he said.

Out in the woods standing by the foundation and watching one dog chew her tennis ball, I am waiting for Lily. I think of Tim again. His life has reached around to touch so much of the world. He is bolstered and propelled by ambition and has succeeded with so much. My life is so little. It takes up only a speck of one town on a map. But my life is not small; it's jammed with more emotion than I can handle and these emotions swell, fill with hot air, and carry me along under a rainbow colored balloon.

I think the old woman wove a fox into my story. He showed up in my basement the other morning, and although he is gone now I am sure he is not far.